A01=Fatima Mojaddedi
Afghanistan
Author_Fatima Mojaddedi
Category=JBSL
Category=JHMC
Category=QDTS1
collective life
counterinsurgency
desire
detour
encounter
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
fault-lines
global order
Kabul
language-encounters
literacy
love
Mahmud Tarzi
modernity
nomadism
normative
plot
psychic life
relationality
representation
shelter
suicide bombing
Taliban
tragic action
translation
vita
Walter Benjamin
Product details
- ISBN 9781478038535
- Weight: 363g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 24 Mar 2026
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Shelter for the Night is an ethnographic meditation on language and psychic life in 2010s Afghanistan, where militarized violence has collapsed social worlds. Across Kabul and the countryside, in poetic and probing style, the book unpacks the precarious relationship between language, violence, and the self. As social and political worlds fracture through militarized violence, economic speculation, interpersonal sabotage, and ruptures in shared understanding, people are set on unexpected detours to discontinuity. Encounters in political life, love, and translation become fragmented, difficult to parse, and entangled in symbolic violence. Yet amid the harsh realities of contemporary life in Kabul, Fatima Mojaddedi finds moments of wonder and rich inner lives of reflexivity, understanding, and social connection. From narratives of modernist ambition and political violence to tragic romance and urbanite translators and their rural interlocutors, Shelter for the Night looks at the challenges of articulating the unspeakable to make a bold claim for the importance of thinking about the contemporary world starting from Afghanistan.
Fatima Mojaddedi is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis.
